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[Zero]

Its one thing to call something easy but until you actualy spend some time doing it and doing it well you cant really discredit any of the peoples work.

[Iriez]

QUOTE (Mage @ May 14 2003, 01:29 AM)

If Irez thinks MS cannot take the site owners to court to try to protect their IP, then he needs to wakeup. Instead people are playing the odds, and the PR game, that MS won't attack the hackers due to the negitive public view of them for it..

Iriez thinks no such thing.

MS is capable of 'making a example' out of anyone.

Though i do believe the situation is unlikely.

[deusprogrammer]

I don't recall ever defaming him or flat out saying it was easy.  Easy is a subjective term first of all, and all I'm saying is that Cyrus is right when he says that credit is due to the people who made the emulator he ported.  Porting things from the PC to the XBox is "easier" than other ports...like perhaps porting a PC game to the PS2.  The reason I call it "easy" to port a PC emulator...written in Direct X no less (the XBox's native language...thus the XBox), is because all the hard work is already done...all of the creative work is done.  All of the code that a programmer somewhere poured his heart and soul into.  You don't seem to realize that programming is a work of art.  The people who programmed these emulators did this project as a work of art...I mean, I don't see them trying to sell their product.  While I appreciate what XPort is doing, he is also taking someone else's work of art and altering it.  Why don't you go take something like the Mona Lisa, and make some alterations to it, and then call it your own.  You probably think I am some dumb fuck kid who just wants to cause trouble.  But I am a Computer Science student in my 3rd year and C++ has been my hobby the latter half of my life.  So don't you dare accuse me of not understanding what I am talking about.  I throw the same challenge back at those of you who flamed my original post...which was completely neutral and fair.  I want to see you port something as well.  Those of you who don't know what you are talking about should either learn enough to make a valid point or be silent.

Now can we just accept that credit should be given where credit is due, realize that OpenXDK isn't going to be functional for a while and accept that most of what we do on this forum is illegal anyways but we don't care, and that donations shouldn't be given to motivate ANYTHING.  All works of art need to be done because the person wants to do them.  If you are motivated to do anything because of money, you are known as a SELL OUT.  XPort is a man I can respect...he is doing this for himself.  He isn't begging you for money, he isn't accepting donations, and he is most likely doing this because he really, really wants to make steps forward in making the XBox the "all in one" game system.    So you know what...I respect and praise XPort, and I am pretty sure Cyrus does.  Because he does the stuff that most of us are just too lazy or under educated to do.  So can we all please stop fighting over nothing?

[deusprogrammer]

Who said I was trying to piss off anyone?  I am just trying to show a middle ground on the issue, and show that porting a DirectX program to the XBox as not being overly difficult.  I am not saying that porters have no skill and I am not defaming XPort.  I am saying that if people want changes made or emulators ported they should just be patient and not try to motivate using money.  And if they really feel they must bribe people to make an emulator then bribe the people who made the original emulator.  Now I'm going to bed.  It's 7am and I need to be at Pandora's Cube tomorrow for another low paying day of XBox modding.

Sorry if there are any inconsistancies, but I am really tired and I need sleep ;_; .

[Jse]

any planned release date on icarus

[HoRnEyDvL]

Man i think that every 1 should just fuck off & let xport do what ever he wants & leave him alone. Your going 2 make him feel that he shouldn't of  ported the emu. Look you have got your emu now shut up go play it. Thes topic should be locked. Dont worry what other people are doing If u want a source y dont u go port it over your self.

[razorrifh]

did xport say hes not gonna release it, or did he just not release it? cuz from what i remember, xbmp did the same thing. they didnt release the source till it was cleaned up and untill it was of a good working order (or somethin like that). yup.

ps) i didnt read through the 6+pages before this one, so i hope this wasnt said before.

pps) and anyone that says he shouldnt release the source is saying he should break the law in my eyes.

*edit* i just read through some of the posts, and i think mage is right. and send me a beta of icarus  

[woo]

This is quite the fragmented thread.  I have read some very serious and intelligible information and some absolute crap, from the most misinformed or perhaps just ignorant people.

What’s important here is the spirit and letter of the law of GPL licensing AND trying to generate respect for the XBOX scene.  Right now there’s a big brown mark of shit over our scene and I can’t stress that enough.  Although we are blessed with a few seriously good porters, many people are put off our scene, not just because of lack of a functional SDK, but the GPL issues, etc..  We're just not showing the emulation/homebrew community the same level of respect that it gets from other scenes (like DC)

Xeero hit the nail on the head about the quality of posting here.  I have great respect for Cyrus64’s posts, the points he made being something I absolutely and strongly agree with.  Alphawolf, Large Dopant white too, maybe a few others I haven’t got time to credit their opinions here…

If we don’t have emulation porters, respecting the GPL license, there's the potential to see a lot less emulators with released source code in the future.  It’s also true that we’re lucky to see the original developers credited.  In some of the emulators that come to mind (not had time to look to name and shame); I don’t remember seeing any credit given to the original authors (who did most the work).  One of these authors is a friend of mine, and though I will keep his name anonymous, I’m sure he wouldn’t be happy to see his name excluded.  It’s something I will be mentioning to him later.  He may choose to remain silent, but I’d hope he’d make a public statement.  God knows he’d word it better than I ever could.

I praise the wonderful work done by people like Xport, Hikaru, Superfro0, SiRioKD, etc..  but, GPL licence isn’t excluded from our scene.  If we want other developers, including emulation authors to respect it, then how about we start showing some respect for them first?  We don’t have a legal SDK yet, but surely we can keep the rest of our house in order for when something does happen?  It’s not that hard.  It would be nice for emu authors, if they don’t post source code with a release, to inform the community from where the source was obtained, exactly when they can expect the source.  This is courtesy.

Some members need a muzzle to control their teenage testosterone surges.  You should know who you are, from the members I’ve praised for their attention to this topic.

I do have a solution I’m in the process of building a device that will render all Dreamcast’s useless (except for current games, apps, etc. ; yes, it’s a wonderful weapon)… and that way will hopefully encourage DC devr’s to move over to XBOX.  

I CAN DREAM!!!!!!

I've tried to be constructive and not to flame anyone or tread on toes unneccesarily.  It would just be nice to think that we could try a little harder to be more professional and considerate in our attitude to this scene.

[Sookie32]

It has been brought up a few times in this thread "Why donate to the porter when the orig. programmer did all the work?"

I donate to the porter because the orig. author probably wouldnt have made a port. So when it comes down to it, the reason I have a psx emu is Xport.

Just my 2c

[Jse]

doesent matter

[woo]

In response to the "why donate?" because it encourages development, allbeit a port of an existing emulator, on the XBOX platform.  

Donation doesn't give you any rights or privelages usually, beyond making a donation.  As said earlier, it's a donation you're making, not paying for a licence.

The N64 donations are going well, because the XBOX community is screaming out for a decent N64 emu.  

All I can hope and pray for is that they show even more good faith and willingness to support furthering the OpenXDK project.  Then they'd see a LOT more development on XBOX.

This is going a bit off-topic, but "donations" have seen XBOX-Linux flourish and hopefully if such means could be used towards OpenXDK, then legitimate compiled binaries would encourage other emulation/apps authors to port/write their own code on XBOX and then we wouldn't be stuck with purely open sourced ports with all the GPL violations going on lol

[Iriez]

QUOTE (deusprogrammer @ May 14 2003, 05:01 AM)

Who said I was trying to piss off anyone?  I am just trying to show a middle ground on the issue, and show that porting a DirectX program to the XBox as not being overly difficult.

Please dont take this as a flame, but instead as a educational post.

While the xbox is directx native, and porting code already written is in directx, it really doesnt decide the preformance of the program.

Some of these guys spend months on what some people call 'easy no brain ports' .

I want you guys to take a look at the N64 on the xbox scenario.

PC version of pj64 -

You can run 64mb roms on 64mb of RAM.

Xbox version of pj64 -

You can run 16mb roms on 64mb of RAM, and NO MORE (at the current moment).

Lantus, who has a very large amount of DirectX and coding on the xbox experience, gave a crack at pj64 on the xbox for a few days. He ended up making a post saying that it just wont happen. You need 128MB RAM. He quoted..

"Dont believe me? Read the docs."

One might ask, how do i have a pj64 port in my hands right now working on the xbox?

Do you think it was a mere 'direct port' ? Do you think that this anonomous person didnt spend a week straight rewriting parts of the program for saving 20-30MB of RAM in optimization? Do you think thats some easy feat?

Anyways, back on track  

Why does the PC have no problem playing a 64mb cart on 64mb of RAM?

Virtual Memory.

So, one might ask, Why doesnt the xbox port just use virtual memory?

And the answer is simple. The xbox kernel has no mmap() or MapToFile() functions. Meaning, you cannot map memory address space to files. This is something that is easily done on windows. Its a every day function. Anyone who wishes to implement such things simply has to read the documentation and code away. This however, is NOT something you can just do on the xbox.

One of the problems of this whole nature, is that these emulators were written to load the whole rom into the memory. PJ64 and MAME are perfect examples. The entire rom is dumped into the RAM when launched, instead of reading parts.

Do you think that rewriting the entire core of pj64, to read the rom in parts intead of dumping it all in, is part of some 'easy direct port' ? Thats what will probably have to be done if the current author cannot find a way to optimize it to save another 20 megs.

Superfr0 tried a different method.

He coded a program to swap memory out, but it only worked for memory allocation. buffer = malloc(size)

So whenever the buffer size was reached, it said "hey its time to swap!"

So what was the problem? It was way too slow. He spent a month straight working on this, and ended up getting absolutly no where. Dead end.

So, here are the options that I forsee.  Keep in mind that there are probably other methods that im not aware of.

1. PJ64's Core needs to be rewritten to call on parts of the rom instead of dumping it in the memory.

2. A kernel hacker such as xecuter needs to recompile the xbox's kernel with mmap() or MapToFile() functions (very unlikely, since were talking about low level encryption here ...i personally dont think xecuter has complete access to the xbox kernel, but just a method of inserting code in it)

3. Create some magical application and compile it in pj64 to help swap memory while your playing, removing and replacing parts of the ROM correctly.

Now, if anyone thinks that any of those solutions is some easy task, you guys better think harder. Infact, the only thing that seems even possible is rewriting the pj64 core.

Now, i could be wrong about this. Im not a developer, but i have talked to a few on this matter.

Point and fact...

Guys, dont knock it till you've tried it, and dont try to tell me that this N64 contest is bullshit because its 'some easy port'. Whoever wins goal 3 is going to damn well deserve what the pot is going to give him. Keep in mind that im not saying the original authors dont, because they do aswell. Remember the people are giving for this, because they want it.

Another version of Gens was released for the xbox today. The author had started working on it before XPort or Hikaru started. He has been working on it for over a month straight.

You try to tell him that porting a program to the xbox is easy.

deusprogrammer - btw most this post wasnt aimed at you directly, so dont mind the questions and 'you' stuff =p

[chilin_dude]

Quote from the title of this thread

QUOTE

Should Xport Respect the GPL?, Release his source or not?

My answer is *drumroll* Yes!
And he has done.
End of Story
Leave it there
Thats it
Go Away
Why are you reading this
Have you got a home?
Schmo!







Go now!
F'n let this thread die already!

[Iriez]

QUOTE (Mage @ May 14 2003, 12:18 PM)

If you're so morally conflicted by such things, you should be working on making this scene legal, before you worry about such trite things as the GPL.

Its been a forsight of xbins for many months to run a OpenXDK contest.

We just had to get our shit togeather. You cannot run a large sponsered contest based off a IRC channel ; )

Its been my goal for a very long time to slightly seperate the xbins branch from the underground distributed files, to the legal side of things.

The first start of this was the launch of our webpage at xbins.org . 95%+ of all the authors in the xbox scene post their news directly to it. Its a small and legal attempt to futher organize this scene, and to give to the community.

Basically, we've just needed to organize things before we can run the contest. It needs to be 100% serious, in order to get sponsership. This thing isnt going to happen overnight, but i am working directly with caustik on organzing the whole thing.

As i told him, *nothing* will be public about the contest until it is 100% ready to launch. We will have everything to the finest details layed out, with full sponsership, before we even announce that it has begun. Yes i know im telling you about it now, but im also letting you know that its barely begun, and that the only update you guys will get will be the day its launched.

The contest will probably be open for donations, but the main key is offical sponsership.

Thanks for the good posts Mage, its nice to have a alternative viewpoint from a intelligent person.

[SSSSSmokey]

You guys get the attention of the Lindows guy, and I'm sure he will help.  No one believes for a SECOND that he "just wants people to use any software on their "legacy-free pc.""  ---This is about the OpenXDK.

Anyway,  releasing the GPL source is like honor among theives.  It must be done.  Just because we have sinned once doesn't mean we are going to hell and can kill puppies and kitties for the rest of our lives.  We can try to do the best we can.  So what if we must use an illegal SDK, we do that because we have to.  We DON'T have to not release GPL source.

Also, anyone who is opposed to the contest.  If you just follow the trail back from the porter, back to the original author, back to the 1st gen emu authors, back to the hardcore guys who hacked everything and wrote these docs, you get right here.

www.nintendo.com

If you think those original emu authors deserve the money more than the people who spent millions designing the system, you are SEVERLY mistaken.

EDIT: Added some stuff